China Rushes To Fill America's Military Vacuum

Defense: Beijing announces another double-digit jump in military spending as the U.S. disarms and sacrifices its defense budget on the altar of entitlement spending. We have many duties; the Chinese have but one target.

China announced this week that its military budget this year would rise 11.2% on top of a 12.7% increase last year. This does not bode well as the U.S. defense budget and force levels decline as a result of cuts mandated by our failure to come to grips with runaway spending.

As China ramps up military spending, President Obama's budget contains $487 billion in cuts that, when added to the half-trillion or so in cuts mandated by the sequestration process, leaves us a military with a precipitately declining capability to meet its global commitments and responsibilities.

The Heritage Foundation has labeled as "factually incorrect" the assertion by Obama and others that U.S. defense cuts are only in the rate of growth. These are real cuts with real consequences, and the consolation that our budget is still larger than the next dozen or so countries combined ignores the fact that none of these states has our global commitments or interests.

China has only one interest — expanding its power beyond its coastlines into the Western Pacific and South China Sea and to be able to defeat any opposing forces within that theater of operations. The president has promised "budget reductions will not come at the expense of that critical region." Yet by crunching the numbers of projected U.S. force levels, it's hard to see how it could not be otherwise.

Heritage reckons the president's budget cuts alone would result in the loss of eight combat brigade teams in the Army, six Air Force tactical fighter squadrons and one training squadron, and 130 aircraft. Ground forces will be reduced by 73,000, or 13%, in the Army and by 20,000, or 10%, in the Marines.

As a result of the president's cuts, we will retire nine Navy ships and reduce the acquisition of new ships. President Reagan's 600-ship Navy will be reduced to less than we've had at any time since World War I. The Navy will shrink to 238 vessels and lose two carrier battle groups needed to project American power and influence.

China's spending hikes give it a defense budget larger than all other Asian nations combined. Heritage's Dean Cheng writes that those figures are "a sobering statistic when one considers that this includes the world's third largest economy (Japan) and North and South Korea, which remain locked in a Cold War-era standoff."

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